Goonhammer Historicals: You Should Play 0200 Hours Solo Mode

I've been up late recently. The 2am to 6am baby shift is hard, but it has its advantages. Bottles fed, babies soothed, time to creep up on fuel dumps, sabotage bridges and generally cause havoc. I've been playing 0200 Hours solo and been having a really great time. As a result and, unusually for our game reviews in Goonhammer Historicals, I want to return to 0200 Hours to talk about it exclusively for one of the weirdest, but easiest to arrange, ways to play wargames: on your own.

Solo play wargames are usually found in hex and chit form, or with slightly kludged together addons that purport to create a satisfying single player experience - unless you're us, of course, where we test the shit out of solo play rules. The ideal of Solo play is that you feel like you're making good choices - playing at least one side to the best of your ability - and the rhythm and narrative of the game flows accordingly. It's a fine line to balance, as neither 100% preprogrammed enemies or entirely random ones provide a satisfying experience. Many games try, usually through a deck of cards or a random number generator which, in symmetrical wargames, leaves you having to make choices for both sides.

0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

0200 Hours is the other kind of solo wargame. Asymmetric, for one thing, so you have substantially different mechanics available to either side, but most importantly it really works as a solo game. Games played on your own have just as much narrative oomph as when you manage to outwit your opponent, and the concept of the game plays into the fact that you have possession of hidden knowledge that your enemy would otherwise hold. I think it is an incredibly satisfying solo experience and I'm here to convince you to give it a go.

Why Go Solo?

There’s a couple of things that make 0200 really work as a solo wargame. To start with it’s a game designed from the ground up to provide two very different experiences. Attacker and defender aren’t just asymmetric play experiences but operate largely on different rules. Defender behaviour is constrained, with elements of predetermined action, clear and limited opportunities for player choice, and randomly determined outcomes. Pre-alarm being raised, the defender side works as a bot opponent for solo play without compromising the play experience. That’s nicely on theme as well, with the active attacker reconnoitering their area of operations, scouting out patrol routes and mapping routes to objectives.

0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

That all stands right up until your commandos have made too much noise and the alarm is raised. Defender behaviour switches to active, open to a lot more choice and involving a much greater degree of player agency. Switching to a more traditional wargame structure does present problems for solo play, but this has been well thought through by Graham in the form of an easily followed guide for solo play actions. It helps that the range of actions a model can take is limited - move, shoot, fight, all within the framework of sight, detection and facing. You do still have choices to make that can potentially shade into the “am I really cheating against myself?” problem that solo wargaming can face, but 0200 is helped by the quite strict rules around who can see what - I’ve had many games where my LRDG have escaped notice by a sliver of an inch, and others where I've been undone by a hasty guess that a sentry couldn’t possibly end their turn close enough to see me!

There's no way the guard will roll two successes and turn in exactly the right direction, right? 0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

Ultimately, and this is probably the highest compliment to a solo wargaming engine, you play this solo because it's bloody good fun and doesn't require you to learn an entire new system on top of the base mechanics. If you know the basic game (which you will after one or two games at most), the solo version is very easy. I have (sadly) played a lot of solo games, and they often - if not usually - require you to do a lot of work and make a lot of sub-optimal decisions to make the bot side work. Not so here. It just works, and the play experience is just as good as it is in the two player version - it's better to have an opponent to annoy with events and orders, but in their absence this is the best bet.

Solo Mechanics

You’re not left entirely on your own and 0200 Hours provides (free!) additional resources for solo play. These are considered and impactful, with the same high production quality as everything else you can pick up for 0200.

It’s a mark of a well designed solo experience that there can still be moments when you’re tense over a dice roll, and 0200 solo play provides this in spades. Patrol routes are, strangely, a much more fun experience when playing solo, as rolling successes and recon/awareness medal effects can swing the balance of the game with sentries sniffing out your concealed attackers with ease, or obliviously walking off into the dark. That feeling of anticipation before a dice roll is often absent in solo play - you’re fighting both sides, so a loss for one is a gain for another - but is preserved here through the basic mechanics. The fact that one of the most memorable dice rolls of a game I’ve had in the last year or so was against myself is worth celebrating as a sign of a great solo play experience.

It's all fun and games.....0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

One of the key two player experiences in 0200 hours is events and order cards. Drawing orders gives the attacker more options and the opportunity to make an activation more impactful, while events usually represent something going wrong (or the defender getting something right), and serve to increase defender agency, particularly in the first half of the game. In solo play, orders are preserved, while event cards are replaced with a deck of 23 solo events, played when drawn. Once drawn they lurk as traps waiting for a trigger - immediate, next attacker action, on playing an order card, and so on. They’re near impossible to play around - and attempting to do so will usually force you into sub-optimal decisions anyway. While they’re mostly the same as the standard event cards, knowing that they’re coming up adds a unique pressure to solo play - if i do this, then X, or I do that and risk Y - that adds another frisson of tension to the experience.

I've twice been caught out by my operatives getting stuck on barbed wire, losing their action in the next turn, causing the loss of a very valuable Bren team and an officer. Drawing the "wrong" event at the wrong time, and having to play it immediately is a real game-changing mechanic, capable of drawing out groans and panicked replanning no matter how well you've mastered solo gaming!

Until you get stuck on the terrain and a guard catches both of you! 0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

My only suggestion would be that you draw more of them - pulling one on the third time token is a good add, and pulling one for every time token makes for a tense (if slightly incompetent) game where fuckups are terribly frequent.

Expansions and Campaigns

As the solo play mechanics work so well, it's a shoe-in that the expansions for 0200 Hours work well solo too, and that means that far from a single scenario that works for solo play, you've got the entire game open to you. Most of the scenarios in the base game work very well - the introductory one isn't all that exciting, but is at least functional, solo - and the (again, free!) North Africa campaign on the Grey For Now site is a great solo play experience. You can easily use all of the expansions for solo play, but having had quite a lot of testing now the standouts are the Partisans and Desert Raids expansions - not just because they add slightly less competent (Partisans) and hyper-competent (Desert Raids) player characters, but for the rules they add.

Solo Partisan play is a lot of fun. 0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

One of the things that makes solo play in many game systems quite difficult is the predictability of the board state. Event cards go a long way to making the game less predictable, but a randomly drawn plan from the Partisan deck, and using the weather events from the Desert Raid expansion can throw a huge wrench into attacker (or defender) plans, forcing you to adapt on the fly, change your approach or providing hugely impactful turns that - against an opponent - would only come from carefully realised strategy. It's hard to outwit yourself, so let the partisans and the changing weather do it for you!

Guards of Facility 9, Operation Torchlight and Stiff Upper Lip all provide new kit and characters for solo play and everything within them works perfectly well, though all events are superseded by the solo versions. Escape from Stalag Luft provides a completely different solo play experience that ends up feeling a bit more chess like, where you set an intricate trap for yourself and try to get through it. It's a very different, much sneakier, solo game but still retains a lot of adrenaline pumping, unexpected, action.

Recommendations for Solo Play

I think the base solo play rules are great (can you tell?), but after two months of solo gaming late at night, I do have a few recommendations for harder, tenser, games that increase the level of information that's hidden from you as the player.

Forces

0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

As recommended, the defenders should have around 25% more points than the attackers to offset the fact you have a brain and they don't. Separate out your officers and sergeants into one pile, and split it. Take all your sentries, shuffle them, and deal two piles, one for initial deployment and one for reinforcements.

Taking more than one silenced weapon with the attackers will make the game too easy - try winning a stealthy assault with a Bren gun instead!

Events

I found the more event cards I drew, the harder the game was, so I have settled on drawing an event card every time a time token is drawn. That really ups the ante, though it does paint the picture of an elite infiltrator unit that is constantly sneezing, tripping up, having equipment faults etc.

0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

The most impactful event in my games was the Barracks - setting up a few more guards in the middle of the table as they spill out of whatever structure they were sheltering in. Games where the Barracks was drawn were notably more exciting than others, to the extent that I now auto-play the Barracks card when the alarm level raises to suspicious, with the nearest vehicle, tent, or building acting as the barracks.

Persistent Deaths

This guy is very dead, which is good, because he's a fascist. 0200 Hours Solo Play. Credit: Lenoon

Even if you're just doing one off solo games, I'd really recommend permadeath! All this really means is not being able to take the same equipment and skill options on models as you did in the previous game, though it's fun to add in equipment restrictions - if the PIAT guy didn't make it home, are they going to send another one out?

Give it a Go!

If you're someone with a plethora of regular opponents, I'm deeply jealous of you - but even then I think you're missing out on a great experience! Playing 0200 Hours on your own isn't an action of the desperate-for-a-game (well, not only that), but a genuinely interesting and challenging experience, to the extent I'd recommend the game if it didn't have a two player version. I've really enjoyed fighting over North Africa with a motely selection of DAK and Italians against my rugged and handsome Bowen's Private Army, and I'm absolutely certain you'll enjoy 0200 Hours solo mode too. So go bloody buy it, if you've ever listened to me about a game it's this one!

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don't forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.

Tags: historicals | ww2 | 0200 | sas | lrdg | solo wargaming